Building on the College Scorecard program it launched last year, the U.S. Department of Education announced today that it may soon start providing “cautionary indicators” to warn students about potentially problematic schools.
While the government didn’t provide specifics about the warnings, college representatives and former Obama Administration officials said the red flags might include low student loan repayment rates, troubled finances, or programs whose graduates end up in low-paying jobs. Currently, the department only issues warnings about colleges facing severe financial difficulties. It has not said when the new changes might go into effect.
Today the department also released an updated version of its massive public College Scorecard database of earnings and student loan repayment data. As a result, you can check the average 2014-15 earnings for students who started as freshmen in 2004-2005 and received federal financial aid, for any college. You can also look up the percentage of alumni who are managing to pay down their student loans. (Here’s a cheat sheet on how to use the Scorecard.)
The Obama Administration began releasing earnings and student loan repayment data last year because “a student’s ability to get a good job and repay his or her loans is one indication of the quality of the education provided” by colleges, the department said in its announcement today. (MONEY now uses federal data on the earnings of alumni of each college in its college rankings.)
The department also said that it plans to start releasing data on the earnings of students who attended some specific programs within each college to supplement the current information, which is just the overall average for each college.
Christine Keller, vice president for research and policy analysis at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said the administration had not discussed such new warnings with her organization, which represents the nation’s large public research universities. But, she said, APLU supports the release of more data on employment and earnings after college, and that the earnings of students should be broken out by program, since the schools’ averages hid a lot of variation among, say, nursing majors and psychology majors.
In addition, she said it might be appropriate for the government to issue warnings about colleges whose alumni have high student loan default rates.
Jordan Matsudaira, who was chief economist of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2015 and oversaw the launching of the College Scorecard, suggested that the government might issue warnings about schools whose alumni have very low student loan repayment rates.